第二十六章

11 March 2011 15:30

I wasn’t sure what had hit the building but it sounded bad. The bang that I heard was followed by what I guessed were pieces of concrete falling into the seawater, plopping like giant pebbles being thrown into a lake. Ohara-san confirmed my fears.

Taihen da! ‘It’s disastrous!’ he shouted. ‘Someone please find out what damage it has caused!’

Two members of his team ran out onto the balcony to see where the port office had been hit. In a few seconds, having assessed the situation, one came back into the room.

‘We’ve been hit by a trawler. It’s been pushed by the tsunami into the side of the building at the level of the floor below. At the moment, the boat seems wedged in place. As long as it stays there, the building should be OK,’ he reported back to Ohara-san and to the rest of us who were listening.

However, the trawler did not stay in place and there was another crunching sound from outside with more scraping of metal. The force of the water was pushing the boat away from the building again. The second man who had now come back into the room could not hide his fear and rushed over to address nobody in particular.

‘The boat’s been swept away! Everybody move to the far wall!’ he shouted.

I did not need Ohara-san or either of my teachers to repeat this message and moved with Haruka as far to the right-hand side of the room as possible. The rest of the students followed and we squeezed together like sardines in a tin. I held Haruka close to me with my chin resting on her left shoulder and kept my eyes fixed on the space across the other side of the room waiting for something to happen. 

It fell silent as we listened to the sound of flowing water. I closed my eyes and imagined it crashing through open windows on the floor below, swirling around like a giant washing machine before pouring out of the other side. Ohara-san had gone onto the balcony to survey the damage left by the boat; for him, like for everyone else, seeing was believing.

It did not happen suddenly, all at once, but in stages. A small section about one metre across fell out of the port office just as if someone had made a hole for a new window and I was left staring out across the tops of the warehouses and other buildings that had not yet been washed away.  The one metre hole then became two as more concrete dropped into the sea. The silence continued; like many others, I was too much in fear to make a sound. A few of my fellow students began to whimper and cry softly, falling onto their knees. Then a section of floor disappeared, the hole in the building got bigger still and I could see the water approaching the level we were on. 

The weight of the building and the power from the sea was too much and about a quarter of the entire port office collapsed into the water. I looked across at Kinoshita-sensei whose face was white. There was nothing that we could do but, sensing the danger of more of the building disappearing, we pushed closer and closer into each other wanting to get as far away as possible from the gaping hole, hoping that the water would stop and that the building would not fall down any more.

I am not sure that I was the first to see it but when I did it reminded me of a time at the beach with Okāsan when I took a walk down by the sea; as the wave broke onto the sand, it shot up around my ankles completely soaking my socks and shoes before I had chance to run away. The seawater here did exactly the same as it spread out over the floor, pouring in through the side of the building. To begin with, it was not deep at all and as I lifted up my feet the splashing sound was similar to when jumping up and down in puddles during the rainy season. I then remembered Hiroki and how quickly the water had risen around his ankles before knocking him over and carrying him away. I thought to myself that we could not stay in this room as the tsunami was finally coming to take our lives.

I don’t even remember making the conscious decision about what to do next but I do remember the shouts from students and adults as I grabbed hold of Haruka’s hand.

‘Come with me,’ I said calmly but with enough urgency in my voice so that she did not have time to question what I was suggesting. ‘We’ve got to leave now.’

We ran across the floor towards the sliding doors that had been left open by Ohara-san. I helped Haruka to stand on top off the concrete walls that surrounded the balcony and then climbed on top myself. Kinoshita-sensei caught up with us.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted, trying to grab us both. ‘Come back inside now!’

‘Jump!’ I shouted to Haruka and we both leaped off the balcony surround into the water that was now just half a metre below us.

The first thing I felt was the cold as my feet entered the sea before my weight took me briefly underwater. All the time I held tightly onto Haruka’s hand. The water was moving at an even faster pace than I had anticipated. By the time we both bobbed up again, it was pushing us back towards the building we had left behind and I was just about able to stop us smashing into the wall by holding up my feet and bending my legs, with Haruka making it even more difficult as she was being squashed into my back. Even so, the water did eventually pin us up against the wall and then rolled us further to our left, towards the corner of the building. I tried to keep us in place and hoped that we could get our breath back a little but I was knocked to one side by something floating in the water and forced to let go of Haruka’s hand.

We were both now pushed out into the wide gap between the port office and a neighbouring building which was also damaged but still standing. I felt the full force of the water as it caught my body and pushed me along with it, flipping me forwards, pushing my face under. By the time I managed to turn myself upright, Haruka was right next to me and I reached out again to grab her. I looked into her eyes and although we could not talk I could tell from the look on her face that she was scared, but still in control.

***

Having survived the brief scare from the blow to his tree, Shoichi secured his position in the branches at the very top. Although many of the buildings had been washed away, the tree stood defiantly and the water continued to flow around its trunk. The sea alone was dangerous enough but anything that it picked up became a battering ram lending a solid state to the liquid water that itself weighed a tonne per cubic metre. The apparent silence from the building suggested to him that it was probably empty despite what he had thought earlier and, for the first time since leaving school, he realised that he had put himself in grave danger without really knowing where Haruka actually was. 

This moment of regret was interrupted by yet more crashing and scraping and screeching cutting through the air; Shoichi saw a trawler emerge from behind the port office before floating on past him to wherever the sea deemed it would take it next. He then heard a noise that sounded like a glacier dropping into the sea, something that they had watched at school in a lesson about global warming. Shoichi looked across to see over a quarter of the port office building crumble into the ocean like a stock cube dissolving into boiling water.

I truly hope that nobody is in there, he thought before looking down through the branches to notice that the water had continued to rise and was now alarmingly close to where he took refuge. He felt that there was probably only about three metres between the surface and his feet. It was impossible to anticipate how much higher the water would rise but he was awestruck that just over twenty minutes ago the ground below him was completely dry.

Outside in the open, the ambient noise was significant, so much so that Shoichi was not sure if he had heard properly but was convinced that someone from the port office building had shouted ‘Jump!’ However, this was probably more a reflection of his own need to feel that he was not out here alone and laughed as he thought about why anyone would leave the safety of a building, albeit one that was damaged, to risk the vagaries of the sea.

***

Can’t wait to find out what happens next?

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